“You don’t say!”

“He’s been absent-minded of late.  It they’d only turned his pockets out instead of—­well, we won’t go into details:  but the two pounds was there all the time.  ’Twas the petty cash he’d swallowed, in the shock at hearin’ about Mr Rogers. . . .  And how’s he, by the way?”

“Bad,” answered Fancy, “dreadful bad.  I don’t think he’s goin’ to die, not just yet-awhile:  but he can’t speak, and his mind’s troubled.”

“Reason enough why, if all’s truth that they tell of him.”

“But it isn’t.”

“He brought your own father to beggary.”

“Well, you may put it that way if you choose.  It’s the way they all put it that felt for Dad without allowin’ their feelin’s to take ’em further.  Not that he’d any claim to more’n their pity.  He speckilated with Mr Rogers, and Mr Rogers did him in the eye, that’s all.  And I’m very fond of Dad,” continued the wise child; “but the longer I live the more I don’t see as one man can bring another to beggary unless the other man helps.  The point is, Mr Rogers didn’ leave him there. . . .  We’ve enough to eat.”

“Ho!  If that contents you—­” Mrs Bowldler shrugged her shoulders.

“Who said it did?  We don’t ezackly make Gawds of our bellies, Dad and I; but there’s a difference between that and goin’ empty.  Ask Pammy!” she added, with a twitch and a grin.

“I’ve heard you say, anyway, that you was afraid Mr Rogers’d go to the naughty place.  A dozen times I’ve heard you say it.”

“Rats!—­you never did.  What you heard me say was that he’d go to hell, and I was sure of it. . . .  And you may call it weak, but I can’t bear it,” the child broke out with a cry of distress, intertwisting her fingers and wringing them.  “It’s dreadful—­dreadful!—­to sit by and watch him lyin’ there, with his mind workin’ and no power to speak.  All the time he’s wantin’ to say something to me, and—­and—­Where’s Cap’n Hocken?”

“In his parlour.  I heard his step in the passage, ten minutes ago, an’ the door close.”

“I’m goin’ down to him, if you’ll excuse me,” said Fancy, rising from the bedroom chair into which she had dropped in her sudden access of grief.

“Why?”

“I dunno. . . .  He’s a good man, for one thing.  You haven’t noticed any difference in him?”

“Since when?” The question obviously took Mrs Bowldler by surprise.

“Since he heard—­yesterday—­”

“Me bein’ single-handed, with Palmerston on his back, so to speak, I hev’ not taken particular observation,” said Mrs Bowldler.  “Last night, as I removed the cloth after supper, he passed the remark that it had been a very tirin’ day, that this was sad news about Mr Rogers, but we’d hope for the best, and when I mentioned scrambled eggs for breakfast, he left it to me.  Captain Hunken on the other hand chose haddock:  he did mention—­come to think of it and when I happened to say that a second stroke was mostly fatal—­he did go so far as to say that all flesh was grass and that Palmerston would require feedin’ up after what he’d gone through.”